For the last couple of years, the copyright world has been grappling with the latest generation of AI, as numerous posts on Walled Culture attest. That’s hardly surprising, since AI is currently delivering the greatest challenge to the foundations of copyright since the arrival of the computer, which was discussed at length in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available). Although this is the main focus, the copyright industry continues to pursue some of its other traditional obsessions. For example, calls for ever-more stringent Net blocks are still being made. France is leading the way once again, reported here by TorrentFreak:
French lawmakers have officially adopted a new sports law that replaces manual domain checks with support for automated, real-time piracy blocking. The system allows for instant blockades during live sports broadcasts, with oversight checks from regulator ARCOM being applied afterward rather than before.
A new study commissioned by the European Parliament calls for something similar:
The study recommends a swift takedown obligation for streaming intermediaries, requiring these to take action within a certain time limit. As an example, it mentions 30 minutes, following the example of Italy’s Piracy Shield.
This takedown requirement should not only apply to Internet providers. Other intermediaries including third-party DNS resolvers such as Google and OpenDNS, VPN providers, and CDNs such as Cloudflare, should also take action.
The suggestion therefore is to adopt all the bad ideas that EU countries such as Italy, France and Spain have been trying out recently, with no sign that any of them actually help.
The copyright companies also continue to chip away at the surprisingly resilient Anna’s Archive. In January, the site lost its main .org domain; in April, Spotify secured secured a $322 million default judgment against the still unknown operators of Anna’s Archive. More recently, the site was hit with what it calls a “coordinated attack” that took it offline for a while, although it is not clear whether anyone in the copyright world was involved.
Against the background of those recurrent copyright topics, it is interesting to see a less familiar issue crop up recently. It concerns large-scale protests taking place in Albania. They were triggered by revelations that Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, planned luxury tourism developments in two important Albanian natural habitats. One of them, the Vjosa–Narta wetland ecosystem, is the home of flamingos. This has led to the mass protests being given the name the Flamingo Revolution.
The protests against the proposed developments have been on a very large scale – some estimate 250,000 participants at times – and have rocked the Albanian government, which was caught completely off-guard by the widespread objections to the plans, and which has struggled to counter them and the widespread support they have received online. That makes the sudden mass suspension of Instagram accounts posting about anti-government protests in Albania because of alleged copyright infringement suspicious, to say the least. Martha Dimitratou, founder of Repro Uncensored, a nonprofit organization that tracks digital censorship, spoke to Wired about what has been happening in Albania:
Dimitratou told WIRED they had verified around 100 cases of account restrictions connected to protests. “We continue to receive additional reports and, based on the volume and patterns we are seeing, estimate that the true number could be several hundred,” she says.
“We also identified that multiple posts on an account would receive copyright complaints, often five to 10 in a relatively short period, followed by escalating enforcement and, in some cases, the disabling of the entire account,” Dimitratou says. “Taken together, the alleged paid reporting, the repeated sequence of copyright complaints followed by account enforcement, the concentration of targets around the same movement, and the repeated targeting of replacement accounts strongly indicate coordinated activity,” Dimitratou added.
Arjan Koçi, who had multiple posts taken down, managed to contact the person behind those copyright complaints. Koçi asked why he was making these false claims against him:
To his surprise, Koçi received a response. “He asked for my contact and then texted me.” The person told Koçi that he had been paid $1,800 to report these accounts and would withdraw his complaints if Koçi paid him. “He said he would accept crypto as payment.”
This kind of coordinated copyright abuse is a well-known phenomenon:
“This tactic of mass copyright reporting, commonly called brigading, is an abuse of the systems that Meta has in place for people to report genuinely problematic, abusive, dangerous, or illegal content on their platforms,” said Kian Vesteinsson, deputy director for tech policy and digital rights research at Freedom House. “We’ve even seen this sort of brigading happen at scale in the context of a war or a conflict. Certainly, it’s a tactic that we saw carried out by the Myanmar military, for example, to go after people criticizing the government’s conduct,” he told WIRED.
As that indicates, this is not a new problem. Walled Culture the book discusses similar cases of copyright being abused for the purposes of censorship, notably as part of online “reputation management” services. These often use false claims of copyright infringement to remove material that is damaging or embarrassing to their clients. The application of similar censorship techniques on a large scale against politically inconvenient material in Albania shows how copyright continues to be perverted for purposes far from the purported ones of encouraging and rewarding creativity.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published on Walled Culture.